Little Gidding

A Communion of Scholars

Ben Napoli and his wife, Marian, sat at the front of the coach behind the young Pattons’ driver, Brian. The trip was taking longer than Ben had reckoned, and, although he tried to maintain a stoic stillness, Marian, the fifteen seminarians, and several spouses sitting behind could feel the palpable tension.

As the seminarians had boarded the bus in Oxford, he showed his map to young Brian and asked if the latter were going to drive east on a motorway that was one side of a triangle he had projected onto the map and then north on another motorway that was the other side. The young man responded negatively.

“The dispatcher said I was to head northeast,” as he traced his finger along what would have been the hypotenuse of his imagined triangle through several small towns and villages. “He said it would save time and energy.”

“O.K.,” answered Ben. “I suppose Pattons knows best.”

Ben would subsequently find out that neither Pattons nor Brain knew best. After everyone was aboard, Ben made his count and came up one short. 

“Who’s missing?”

“Robert decided to stay here and catch up on some needed rest,” answered Lucy Wilson, whose husband was an Episcopalian minister.

“Oh,” answered Ben most obviously disturbed by this second disappointment of the morning, which came about not so much because he wondered if the calamity of the first expedition to Hardy country had resulted in the minister’s decision, but rather because he felt the clergyman, of all the people in his band of the stranded, might not have gotten the most out of today’s odyssey.

When he designed the program, Ben knew he wanted to visit the sites alluded to in three of Eliot’s Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, East Coker, and Little Gidding. What he did not know was that Little Gidding was just as active a community of prayer now as it had been in the seventeenth century when Nicholas Ferrar established it and had been once again inspired to become one partly by Eliot’s visit there in the thirties. When he finally got hold of Sarah Van de Kamm, the young and, as she would turn out, attractive manager of the community of prayer, to arrange a visit, he not only was greeted with an affirmative response to his request, but also was offered a rather unique fringe benefit.

“Dr. Napoli, would you be interested in listening to a reading while you are here?”

“What kind of reading?”

“We have put together a selection of Eliot’s poems. It includes some original music as well. Of course, it will only be we lay members of the community reading, but we have presented it before and have met with a rather enthusiastic response. Your visit would give us the opportunity to perform it again. Are you interested?”

Of course he was interested and accepted the offer. But he had not told his seminarians about the reading. After all, the reading itself, together with their not knowing about it, would give more meaning to certain lines of Eliot’s poem.

 Ben’s attention was brought back from his recollection of their departure that morning to the present as his unconsciousness picked up the time from a store front window and relayed it to his conscious mind. As he looked at his watch, he confirmed what the big clock had told him: it was already 10:45 and they were certainly more than fifteen minutes away from their destination and the appointed time of the reading. Again, he thought he managed to contain his growing irritation, but apparently not, for at that very moment, Bill, the seminarian who had asked the rector of the small church in Bere Regis if he might try the organ and who would ask just about everyone in every church the seminar would visit the same question, began his own rendition of a Bernstein and Sondheim song, which a few of the seminarians quickly joined in on.

“I feel Gidding, oh, so Gidding.

“I feel Gidding and gaily and lost . . . “

    Napoli managed a smile for he was certain it was Bill’s way of trying to alleviate the growing tension in the coach. But when young Brian reached an intersection and turned east toward Cambridge instead of west toward Huntington, Ben could no longer sit still.

Map in hand, he rose from his seat behind the driver, stepped up, and asked the young man pointedly if he knew where he was going.

“You know, we’re going to Little Gidding in the morning and Cambridge in the afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Then why have you turned towards Cambridge instead of Huntington?”

“It’s the way to Little Gidding, gov.”

“No, it’s not. Little Gidding is northwest from here, not east. Have you ever been there?”

“No, sir!”

“Then you follow my directions. As soon as you can, turn the coach around and head west.”

Rather than return to his seat, Ben defied the rules of British coach passage and sat down in the aisle, next to the young man, who did not have the nerve or experience to challenge him.  Several miles farther, he issued his second command.

“Turn right here.”

Ben had seen a sign to a town situated on the map only a few miles from the Giddings. He wondered how the English ever won the war against the more efficient Germans. Oh, of course it was with the help of the Americans, but he could not believe that “muddling through” is on occasion superior to “following orders.” After several more turns right, left, and right again -- through rolling hills of golden wheat pied with red poppies growing wild amid the corn -- they finally came upon a sign for Little Gidding.

“I see Gidding, Little Gidding,” came the refrain from Bill, God bless him, thought Ben; he was merely expressing what relief all felt, including the director.

At last they came to a lane at the head of which was a posted sign: The Community of Christ the Sower. It was 11:20, but hopefully, Miss Van der Kamm had delayed beginning the reading. Ben directed the driver to turn in. The latter hesitated a bit, and Ben sensed he was prepared to say he could not take the coach through such a small lane, a declaration he had heard before in Hardy country and had ignored, but the young man bit his tongue and managed a tricky turn around a tight corner and between two large trees. The coach came to a halt about thirty yards away from what appeared to be more of an isolated farmhouse than a community of the faithful. Two cars were parked there, and nowhere was there a sign of people

He told everyone to remain on board and hopped off the coach and dashed to the house. He was greeted by the sole occupant with the news that everyone else was at the chapel.

“Where’s the chapel?”

She directed him outside and pointed to the east. And sure enough, there it was, fifty yards beyond the hedge row just as Eliot’s poem had described.

He explained who he was and why he was late.

“May my people use the facilities?”

“Yes, there are two bathrooms, one downstairs and one upstairs.”

He returned to the coach, informed his seminarians of the facilities and made off for the chapel. When he entered, he could see the reading was already in progress for an audience of two couples. Miss Van der Kamm saw him and immediately stopped the reading, walked down the aisle, and greeted him.

“Dr. Napoli?”

“Yes, I apologize for arriving late, Miss Van der Kamm, but our driver got lost.”

“Please call me Sarah, and I will call you Ben. 

“No problem. Many visitors get lost trying to find us. 

“Where is your group?”

“They’re using the facilities.”

“You round them up, and when you return with them, we will resume -- from the beginning.”

He left the chapel and walked quickly toward the house. He could not recall hearing anything of the reading which must have taken place between his entrance and his being sighted by Sarah. All he could remember was the chorus’s appearance: with the exception of their spokeswoman, the readers might very well have been AARP seniors prepared to do a reading of one of their own members’ poetry. After he had used the facilities himself, he gathered everyone and herded them to the chapel.

It was dark, lit only by a little light coming through the stained glass window behind the altar and from the Baroque chandelier hanging above the nave. He thought he detected a stare of impatience from the natives who were once more confronted with the cheekiness of the colonials who made it necessary, this time, for the locals to wait while they assembled and the reading to begin again. His sensitivity to their impatience was checked by his realization they were getting much more than they had expected when they set out today to visit Little Gidding. After all, there would be no reading had they, the colonials, not decided to come visiting themselves.

The members of his entourage almost filled the wooden benches and covered the dark paneling behind them along both sides of the nave. The readers stood before the altar and lifted their folders in readiness for the second beginning that day. The three men were completely gray haired, portly, and wore white shirts and dark trousers. The four women were also almost completely gray haired, including Sarah, but slighter than the men, and they wore plain white blouses and bright skirts. Napoli’s correspondent, who stood to the extreme left of the group, reached over and pressed the button of a CD player, and original harp and piano music began to fill the small chapel. The music served to soften the taut facial expressions of the two native couples and to relax the nervous systems of the NEH seminarians for the first time since they discovered the coach driver did not know where he was going and their director was growing impatient with his incompetence.

At the conclusion of the musical introduction, the reading began with a light-hearted rendition of a sample from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: The Rum Tum Tugger, that curious cat. The audience, including the natives, who had no doubt heard it earlier, responded with laughter. Ben, who managed a smile, was impressed with the voices of the two men who shared the reading. He was not certain it if were the fact that they were English and therefore he were predisposed to receive their clipped utterances favorably or that they had some vocal training during their education on the isle, but he found them much more polished than he had expected in amateurs.

After a little Scott Joplin music and some early Eliot poetry, the group turned to a reading of the first movement of Ash Wednesday.

“Because I do not hope to turn again

“Because I do not hope . . . “

It was astonishing. Yes, their voices had been impressive, when sounded alone, but how much more striking they were in unison. They blended into a forceful instrument with a deep and full-bodied timbre and a mellifluous harmony. Ben looked around and found all of his entourage, including his own incorrigible Andy, was mesmerized by the reading. Such was the price one had to pay when directing a seminar or leading a tour, he was always subject to withdrawal from being lost in the performance to evaluating the degree to which his charges had lost themselves in the moment.

After a sampling from choruses from “The Rock,” the four women began their version of one of the choruses from Murder in the Cathedral.

“Have I not known . . .

“What is woven on the loom of fate

“What is woven in the councils of princes

“Is woven also in our veins, our brains,

“Is woven like a pattern of living worms

“In the guts of the women of Canterbury?”

Again Ben turned from his own appreciation of the wonderful sound of the conspiratorial voices to measure the response of his seminarians. He detected a tear or two in the eyes of the three catholic nuns who formed part of his seminar. What was it, he asked himself, that had effected such a response? Was it the community’s faith that had informed their voices? Was it their dedication to silent prayer that had helped score their oral poetic prayer? Or was it that somewhere in their past they had all conspired, had actually breathed together, in choral singing, which had prepared their way to communal living?

Following another musical interlude featuring the Kryie Eleison from the Cantus Ecclesiae sung by, Ben suspected, a choir of nuns, the seven readers turned to the Quartets themselves. From Burnt Norton, they read the concluding lines:

“Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.” 

And he reflected upon the preposterous, interminable,  three hours that preceded their arrival at their destination and discovered what they thought they had come for was “only a shell, a husk of meaning from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled.” And it had been fulfilled finally in the conclusion of the community’s reading of portions of the last quartet, testimony to the accomplished end of The Church of Christ the Sower and of the pilgrims who had come to worship at the site that had inspired their spiritual guide.

“Quick now, here, now, always—

“A condition of complete simplicity

“Costing not less than everything

“And all shall be well and

“All manner of thing shall be well

“When the tongues of flames are in-folded

“Into the crowned knot of ire

“And the fire and the rose are one.”   

    At this point, as he would reflect later, Ben felt he was no longer listening to voices from without but was immersed in, surrounded and caressed by, the full-bodied voices filling the small chapel. Later he would admit he did not know if the reading would help the seminar interpret the meaning of the enigmatic last three lines, but he realized instantly upon the conclusion of the reading that it had already enabled them to experience more fully the poem and the relationship between it and the landscape that informed it. 

He looked around again at his seminarians and saw the few, isolated tears in the eyes of the nuns had been transformed into a torrent flowing from the eyes of all. 

The seven readers had closed their folders and were starting down the aisle toward the front door. The chapel was silent save for the isolated attempt of the men to inhale their tears. Ben broke the silence by clapping his hands and the audience followed and applauded the worshippers out of the chapel. The seminarians were the first to follow them out as Ben brought up the rear waiting until the very end to allow the two English couples to pass smilingly before him.

    By the time he exited the chapel, the readers were surrounded by the seminarians, some of whom were hugging the former, some, seeking autographs on their folded mimeographed programs they had received upon entering, and some still wiping away tears. With his family standing to the side to allow the students complete access to the performers, the latter began to draw back to allow Ben to enter their circle and approach Sarah. 

    He stood before her, clasping his hands upon his breast, and said clearly and loudly “Thank you!” He then unclasp his hands, spread his arms wide apart before the choir, and continued.  “Thank you all for a most moving and memorable experience!” He hugged the attractive young leader of the community, who responded to his praise with another invitation.

    “I know you have brought along your brown bag lunches, but we have prepared a warm soup made from the vegetables of our garden. We invite you to the farmhouse to try our soup and some home-brewed mead while you eat your lunches.”

    Ben looked around and received nothing but nods from his students.

    “We accept!”

    “Good! Yes, quite good! And if you have time after lunch, I would be happy to lead you on a brief visit of the church at Leighton Bromswold, five miles south of here, where George Herbert was priest.”

    Again, he turned to his charges and was faced with more nods, especially energetic ones from the three nuns.

“It means we’ll probably have to cut back an hour on our afternoon visit to Cambridge?”

    “We’d rather visit George Herbert’s church,” was Sister Shiela’s immediate response, one echoed by most of the other seminarians.

“Yes, thank you,” Ben told his hostess.

The small chorus of men and women headed toward the farmhouse, each accompanied by and conversing with one or two of the seminarians before the latter had to peel off to retrieve their lunches from the coach. Ben quickly calculated “the time after” and concluded the lunch here, which had been intended to be eaten in Cambridge, would cost them one hour less in Cambridge, and the hour he would allow for Leighton Bromswold, would require them to return to Manchester an hour late, one that he felt both Pattons and Brian owed them.

He took one more look at the seminarians, who, having fetched their lunches from the coach, were once more walking along and talking with the members of The Community of Christ the Sower, and he knew that for the next five weeks of the seminar, everything was going to turn out well. His band of the stranded had become a communion of scholars.